Mr. Aodhán Connolly:

Gabhaim buíochas leis an gCathaoirleach agus le baill an choiste. Táim fíorbhuíoch as an seans seo fianaise a thabhairt dóibh ar an mBreatimeacht agus an dóigh ina bhfuil sé ag cur isteach ar an earnáil gnó anseo sa Tuaisceart. I am very grateful for this opportunity to talk to the members. I appreciate their interest in how the protocol and Brexit are affecting the North. I have two hats today. First, I am the director of NIRC, as the Chairman has mentioned, and second, I am the convenor of the Northern Ireland Business Brexit Working Group, which was set up in December 2019 to work to find common business positions and amendments to the withdrawal agreement Bill that was going through Parliament at that time and to push forward regarding the protocol and the withdrawal agreement. Since then, we have given evidence in Europe, Scotland, Westminster and, now, Dublin. We have produced research papers to find the challenges and possible solutions, and we have met everyone from Vice-President Šefovi and Mr. Michael Gove to the Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Taoiseach. Therefore, we bring a wealth of experience to the table.

A lot has been said about the protocol since 1 January, and even before then. There are those who have said there are absolutely no problems at all and there are those who have said Northern Ireland was starving owing to empty shelves. Both of those narratives are inaccurate and false and they do a great disservice to the men and women in retail and logistics who have worked non-stop to make sure goods kept moving. The truth is that the average supermarket carries around 40,000 to 50,000 product lines and there were only ever a few hundred products missing. That is a choice issue, not a food shortage issue. It was not just because of the protocol. There were seven days during which EU-GB trade was stopped because of Covid. There was a knock-on effect. We were also in lockdown, which meant people were not eating out or going to cafés and restaurants. That means there was more pressure on the supermarkets. In January and February, it is not unheard of that we run out of products quite simply because, at that time of the year, about 65% of all fresh fruit and vegetables, including 90% of lettuce and 80% of tomatoes, are bought from the EU. It is outside the growing season so it is not unheard of for us to have those problems.

There have been challenges.

There are customs forms to fill in for each one of those 50,000 items that are on shelves. We are not yet back at capacity because a lot of Northern Irish retail is still under lockdown and not open. That is quite worrying and more pressure is going to be put on.

The export health certificates came in on 22 February for those things on the prohibited and restricted list, such as chilled fresh meat products. That showed us that there was a real problem coming down the tracks from 1 April. The agreement between Vice President Šefovi and Michael Gove outlining the grace period and the system that would be in place was signed on 8 December. We wrote to them on 10 December thanking them but stating that was not going to be enough time. For us, the principle of the grace period was that it would be in place until a system was in place. That system is not in place and, therefore, we still needed a grace period. That decision was taken unilaterally by the UK Government. We are of the opinion that it should have been taken bilaterally. Representatives of supermarkets wrote to Michael Gove on 22 January. We had conversations a few days before the meeting of the joint committee with both Vice President Šefovi and Michael Gove where we explained the need for the extension of the grace period not only on sanitary and phytosanitary, SPS, products but also on parcels. We felt that we had been listened to and were hugely disappointed that no agreement emerged from the joint committee, seemingly for political reasons. That is the big problem we have had here. This has been a political process when it should have been a technical one. Last year, we had a transition period which was a complete misnomer. It was a protracted negotiation period. We, in business, only found out 18 hours before the end of the transition period what the new regulations for parcels would be. We only found out two weeks before the end of the transition period how to use the new systems. We only found out three weeks beforehand what those grace periods would mean. The business sector is not a light switch. It needs time to adapt and make changes.

The unilateral decision was made on a Wednesday and on the following Friday, retailers were going to have to take some severe decisions that would affect the supply chain of groceries in the North. There was a breakdown somewhere in the politics of this. The business community has, from the very start, used, as the Europeans say, meilleurs efforts, best endeavours, to try to make this work. When the protocol came out, we said that the Prime Minister had not listened to the Northern Ireland business community or the wider community in the North. We are now trying to make it work because it is in law. There will be opportunities in the future but what we are trying to do now is to make sure that our baseline, which is to give Northern Irish consumers, households and families choice and affordability, remains our primary concern in all of this.

There are those who have been questioning the UK Government. People who know me know that I shoot straight from the hip. If something is going badly, I will be the first person to say it and if something is going well, I will also be the first person to say it. I was very critical of the UK Government and its engagement last year, especially in the context of HM Revenue and Customs, bays and those different areas that really needed to step up to the mark. The UK Government is now throwing the kitchen sink at it and looking at how to solve these problems. What we need are four things. We have the stability if we get the good grace from the EU to allow those extensions to the grace period to stand. We need the certainty that comes from a long-term, workable solution that is delivered with business and not done to business.

We need simplifications, such as the digital assistance scheme. That digitisation allows us to give evidence to the EU to show that, because of the dead-end host principle, things that go into the North are not going to go any further and are of little risk. We also need to consider simplifications such as a veterinary agreement, but again that falls into the role of politics. What we can say, however, is that a veterinary agreement would make things a lot easier. It all has to be done under the guise of affordability. That involves holding the EU and UK to their commitments under the protocol. It was said all this will be done with the least disruption to communities across Northern Ireland, and that means keeping Northern Ireland business competitive and keeping costs down for Northern Ireland households.